Anime, games, and anime games

shit animation

Well, I think that my praise for Ranpo Kitan‘s mystery was a bit too early and lo and behold, I was wrong about the mystery. In this episode, it just kind of… fizzled out without much in the way of a satisfactory conclusion to it. But at the same time, it was… certainly something special. I don’t know if the “good” special like GARO: The Animation or the “bad” kind of special. At least it wasn’t boring.

After the disappointment of last season, we finally get some new shows. Will it break the terrible curse that Winter put upon 2015 in anime? Will it be as good as last Fall? Will Wit Studio do a quality product once again? Will there be more quality fujoshi bait? Will people who eat pizza with ranch please stop doing that shit?

As I said in my previous post about this series, the animation in Arslan sucks fat wet asses. However, like those cheap mints they give out in lobbies worldwide that taste like damp armpits, it does have a certain charm to it. Like in the above picture, where it’s animated much fluider than regular, yet it still somehow manages to simultaneously fail and succeeed at being a fight scene.

The choreography is seriously lacking, with Old Mentor Dude repeatedly failing to actually connect but somehow being able to slash his opponents. It’s more remiscient of a bunch of gradeschoolers playing pretend at the schoolyard rather than epic high fantasy combat. But that’s what made this scene so much fun to to watch, and I wouldn’t have it otherwise unless they got the GARO fight choreographer on board. That’d be swell.

Arslan Senki is a series with a lot of story. It’s a series of novels, proper real novels not of the light variety, that started in 1986, thus making it older than me by eight years. Releases of recent novels, however, have been more and more scarce, thus making Dr. Yoshiki Tanaka the George R. R. Martin of Japan, minus all the blood and tits. Possibly.

It a multitude of adaptations, most notably a 90s manga, a 90s OVA which had beautiful animation until J.C.Staff took over. And now, the author of Fullmetal Alchemist, Hiromu Arakawa is now doing an adaptation. And it is glorious.

And so Winter 2015 wraps up its second month, and my opinion of this season takes a nosedive. Promising shows failed to deliver on their promise and shit shows became somehow shittier. But at the same time, good shows became even better, and some shit shows are trying. It’s not so much as this season sucking as much as there being a wide gap between shit shows and quality shows.

Let’s get this over with, shall we? (And yes, it’s organized from best to worst).

Last week, I watched GARO: The Animation thinking that it would be the finest episode there would ever be of this series. I mean, it did some excellent work on León’s character development and had some of the best animation the show’s budget (read: a grilled cheese sandwich per animator) will ever allow.